Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six: Validation of Language Skills in the Jamaican Context

The Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS) is one of a few validated outcome measures related to children’s communicative participation. Additional validation of the FOCUS measure could address the paucity of validated outcomes-based measures available for assessing preschool-age children, particularly for those who are multilingual. The data collected for this study, with a representative sample of Jamaican Creole-English speaking children, extend the applicability of the FOCUS to a broader range of preschoolers and expand psychometric evidence for the FOCUS to a multilingual and understudied context.

The Making of Languages and New Literacies: San Andrés-Providence Creole with a View on Jamaican and Haitian

The aim of this paper is to examine the idea of «language making» and new literacies in creole languages with a focus on San Andrés-Providence Creole English. Jamaican and Haitian Creole are taken as points of comparison for their more advanced state of consolidation. Posts from Facebook groups gathered between February 2016 and July 2020 as the main source of data were complemented by 2015 data on San Andrés linguistic landscapes. The main finding is that, due to a favorable change in language attitudes both locally and globally, San Andrés-Providence Creole is entering into the domain of writing.

Da decolonizing real: Liberating humour in Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye

Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye (2019), which collects 35 years of poetry written in Creole English, referred to in Hawai’i as Pidgin, uses liberating humour to claim decolonizing realities, unsettling colonial myths that indigenous sovereignty has been subsumed or destroyed. The collection vaunts ways of knowing and being embodied by a language that has often been dismissed, like other creoles, as “corrupt and bastardized”. “History of Pigeon”, the opening poem, unveils contemporary English as itself a long-time mixture of languages in its vocabulary and syntax. Challenging the very premise of monolingualism and colonial sovereignty, the poem suggests there is no such thing as a pure language unmixed with other languages, or free from violence and trauma. The Pidgin eye reveals that the colonial homogenous is an impossibility; throughout the collection Balaz establishes Pidgin as an epistemic, aesthetic, and activist decolonizing resource.

INDIAN DIASPORA AND TRANSLATION STUDIES IN MAURITIUS

The present paper aims to study the functions of literary translation and Indian diaspora writers with special reference to Mauritius, a small island being multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual. Our study includes the presentation of the situation of literary translation in Mauritius and analysis of some of the major works translated to query challenges of post-colonial translation. The corpus includes two translations chosen where Mauritian Creole is now part of the target language (eg Boy, transcreation of Misyon garsonby Lindsey Collen). The translation into Creole an, in fact, literalization of language and to establish a literary heritage. The translation is rewriting in our two Mauritian authors, which in the case of the rewriting of The Tempest in Creole, Dev Virahsawmy makes speech-cons when choosing this time to rewrite the Creole English and Lindsey Collen, aims to make available the novel-reader Mauritius. The handwriting in Lindsey Collen also helps address the problem of translation of spoken language (Creole) in a written language.

Circumlocutions with the noun peopo ‘people’ in Hawai’i Creole English

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of circumlocutions with the noun peopo in Hawai’i Creole English from The Revelation of St. John Divine in the HCE Bible. These examples are contrasted with their equivalents from King James’ Bible. The main aim is to conduct a quantitative analysis of selected circumlocutions. Moreover, possible grammatical structures for circumlocutions are analysed. Circumlocution is, in fact, an effective word formation process in Hawai’i Creole English since it allows its speakers to create new lexical items that can bridge lexical gaps in their lexicon.

Le français en espace créolophone – Guadeloupe et Seychelles

Both in Guadeloupe and in the Seychelles a French-based Creole coexists with French. In addition to this shared main ecological parameter, the two areas diverge in several other points of their contact ecology: First, due to the different timing of French colonization, the French variety exported to Guadeloupe in the 17th century differed from the variety exported to the Seychelles a century later. Second, while the Seychelles were a British colony from 1814 to independence in 1976, Guadeloupe always remained French and is still a French overseas department. Therefore, the contact ecology in Guadeloupe may be characterized as a reciprocally dominant monocontact situation (see Gadet/Ludwig/ Pfänder 2009), while the situation in the Seychelles is one of polycontact (Seychelles’ Creole-English-French), with Seychelles’ Creole and English being dominant in their influence on French (while the reverse is not the case). Using data from several corpora of spoken and written French in the Seychelles and Guadeloupe, this paper shows instances of code copying (e.g. Johanson 2002, Kriegel/Ludwig/Henri 2009) from the two Creole languages (and English) on the morphosyntactical level.

Representing Variation in Creole Continua: A Folk Linguistic View of Language Variation in Trinidad

The issue of linguistic distinctions in creole continua has been extensively debated. Are creole continua comprised of just an “acrolect” and a “basilect,” or do they also comprise additional varieties? Studies of variation in creole continua have been typically based on directly observed linguistic data. This study argues that perceived sociolinguistic distinctions can offer one point of departure for establishing what linguistic components constitute creole continua. Following a protocol developed within “Perceptual Dialectology” (see, e.g., Preston 1999) this study describes perceived sociolinguistic distinctions via folk linguistic descriptors elicited by means of linguistic map-drawing and labeling tasks. The aim of this study is to investigate perceived language variation in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, where Standard English historically co-exists as an official language with creolized varieties of English, which the literature generally refers to as “Trinidadian Creole English.” The main finding of this study is that Standard English has a strong perceptual association with Trinidad’s historic urban centers, while non-standard varieties collectively referred to as “dialect” or “creole” are associated with the rest of the island. The study discusses indications that linguistic boundaries—largely parallel to ethnoracial boundaries—are perceived within the standard and non-standard part of the Trinidadian continuum. One major perceived linguistic criterion for differentiation within the non-standard part of the continuum is the presence or absence of Standard English elements. The saliency of “mixed” varieties suggests that a variety located halfway between Standard English and Trinidadian Creole English could be emerging. The study concludes that the urban-rural divide and ethnoracial distinctions constitute two salient social fault lines that future studies of language variation in Trinidad should take account of while searching the Trinidadian continuum for objectively verifiable linguistic boundaries.